More than nine hundred people died at the Guyana settlement on 18 November 1978. The phrase that entered the language, and the idiom drinking the Kool-Aid that came out of it, both carry an assumption that the deaths were volitional. The evidence does not support that as a general description.
Rebecca Moore, whose family lost two daughters there and who has spent a career on the primary material, sets out the distinctions that the single word obscures. Roughly a third of the dead were children. Children cannot consent, and the poison was administered to them by adults; those deaths are homicides on any reading, and they alone account for a third of the total.
Among the adults, the recorded evidence indicates a range rather than a uniform act. Some appear to have taken the poison willingly, and the movement had rehearsed the event in earlier loyalty tests. Others were injected. The settlement was ringed by armed guards, and the audio recording made during the deaths captures dissent being voiced and overridden.
The killings at the Port Kaituma airstrip, in which Congressman Leo Ryan, three journalists, and a departing member were shot, were unambiguously murders and preceded the deaths at the settlement.
The formulation used by researchers who work on the material is murder-suicide, or more precisely a combination of murder, coerced suicide, and suicide. That is longer than the popular phrase and it is the one the record supports.
There is a second reason the shorthand is worth resisting. The idiom now means little more than credulous conformity, and it is applied to office politics and consumer choices. It has drifted a long way from an event in which most of the dead were children and the poison was, in a large number of cases, not chosen.